Meet our latest Stephen S. Rose Legacy Scholar

The Steve Fund is proud to announce the most recent winner of a Stephen C. Rose Legacy Scholarship: The winner of the 2017 Active Minds Stephen C. Rose Scholarship is Khushbu Patel, a second year Master’s student at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. A native of Philadelphia suburbs, she completed her Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology at Drexel University, while working in the Nezu Lab. She served as a Research Assistant on various projects, and as interim Project Manager for one year in a pilot RCT exploring the efficacy of Problem-Solving Therapy in hypertensive patients. Since then, she has worked as a Clinical Research Assistant with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Violence Prevention Initiative. In this role, she supported facilitation of an aggression-reduction program based in West and Southwest Philadelphia Public Schools. In her social work program, she is exploring many interests including U.S. urban public school systems, juvenile justice systems, and mental health research focusing on Asian American ethnic groups.

Khushbu received the Stephen C. Rose Legacy Scholarship for her project titled “Transgenerational Perceptions of Mental Health Among South Asians”. This project employs qualitative methodology to understand how culture influences the way South Asians conceptualize ‘mental health.’ There is a large body of literature on mental health stigma amongst South Asians, but little that looks at the cultural pathways that facilitate one’s understanding of mental health and well-being. Khushbu will focus on the college-aged South Asian population, where many are having their first wide-scale encounters with mental health resources, while statistically underutilizing them compared with peer groups – all while occupying a precarious position of increased suicidal risk.

Khushbu says she developed this project with short-term and long-term sets of goals, and through the fellowship she will tackle the former. For the short-term project framework, she aims to conduct semi-structured interviews with college-aged individuals and thematically analyze the qualitative data. The finished product would involve a brief “review of findings” paper and interactive presentation delivered on campus at the University of Chicago, particularly aimed at social workers. Ultimately she hopes to contribute to the body of work – in both academic literature and fiction writings – that explore South Asian mental health experiences.

The goal of The Stephen C. Rose Legacy Scholarships is to promote the emotional well-being and mental health of youth in ethnically diverse communities. By supporting competitive scholarships for research on the mental health challenges facing college students of color, the Fund is supporting the growth of a generation of scholars with knowledge and capacity to address the mental health needs of our target population. Find out more about the Fund’s scholarships here.

Our mission: Promoting the mental health and emotional well-being of students of color. Sign up for Updates